New Delhi, Sep 1 : As India embarks on a new digital path across industries, businesses are seeking the top talent to help them grow.In this scenario the importance of engaging and hiring platforms becomes crucial, allowing companies to interact with potential candidates in the most engaging way to find, assess and select the most talented candidates.EduHRTech Startup Unstop (formerly Dare2Compete) with more than three million active users has simplified the entire HR process for both students and employers and students, easing their journey to careers.
Ankit Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Unstop Ankit Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Unstop, said to IANS that, unlike other platforms for education Unstop does not intend to become involved in curating and selling courses, but instead provide students with opportunities to showcase their talents and get noticed as well as build their resumes to be hired.
Here are the experts of the interview:
Q What’s the vision for the future and mission of Unstop?
A Unstop is a community recruitment and engagement platform that stems from our belief that we can #BeUnstoppable.
Unstop helps companies find engage, assess and recruit the best talent beyond borders by engaging in gamified engagements- hackathons, coding challenges business case contests, games such as quizzes, hiring challenges and more.
This comes in conjunction with the conventional method of customized job descriptions that accept applications, complete tech and non-tech MCQs and coding tests, as well as conduct interviews.
Unstop also connects talent that is unstoppable with the universe of opportunities to go beyond their resumes.
It allows students and early professionals from all fields, regardless of their experience to gain knowledge about, practice, and take part in games-based engagements such as hackathons, quizzes and simulations, case competitions etc.These are organized by businesses and institutes to meet their recruitment, branding of employers and general engagement needs.
In this way they are acknowledged, rewarded, get resume points and eventually, they are employed by the dream companies.
In a real sense Unstop can make hiring and engagement more accessible by connecting people around the globe.
Q What’s your USP? What is your uniqueness in the EdTech landscape?
A: To view us as facilitators of pure-play EdTech platforms.We don’t plan to become involved in curating and selling courses.
We offer students the chance to showcase their talents and get noticed and build their resumes and even get hired.
All of these EdTech platforms will be successful in the event that their students are admitted in their dream companies or succeed in their area by outdoing other companies in this field.Unstop, for instance, Unstop do exactly this.Give them these opportunities.
That is our USP and sets us apart from the other competitors.
Our MOAT is an organically expanding community of 3.5 million students and early talent across all domains.These users are our customers in an authentic, product-driven growth model.
Our platform is free for students who want to host their events on Unstop to make it known in their networks.This allows us to gain new users and current user engagements.Companies want to be part of and recruit from this group to #GoBeyondBoundaries and #GoBeyondRe.
It’s like people creating their own pages on FB and LinkedIn organically, and then promoting them to increase their followers and subscribers.In the end, this network effect creates FB as well as LinkedIn stronger with every new page.Similar to how Unstop grows its presence with every fresh organic listing.
Q: What is the size of your operation and your expansion plans in the next couple of years.
A As a bootstrapped company We’ve grown 2x in the last few of years.We’re now planning to achieve 3-to-5x increase in the coming couple of years, across various parameters such as Clients, Revenue and User Base Opportunities Listings, User Engagements and so on.
Today, we have an 3.5 million active students across all domains like MBAs, Engineering, Arts, Commerce, Science and many more.From 40,000 colleges and businesses.
We receive an average of 3,000 organic listings on Unstop every month which is twice of what we received last year.
There are more than 200 businesses and universities as paying customers and this year, more than 60 percent of business comes from new clients.We’re anticipating 90 per cent or more repeat business from existing customers.This is an incredible growth.Particularly when your marketing costs are minimal.
We invest 60 percent of the profits in existing markets and use cases with 40 percent in the newest ones.This allows us to are able to penetrate our market while exploring new growth areas.
We’re launch our B2C SaaS to ensure that any business regardless of size or budget, can start using us.We’re following the AWS method of working, which is Pay-as-you-go.We charge separately for products and services to facilitate expansion across the entire spectrum of your customer profiles.
Q: Provide us with some instances (customer successful stories) of the impact you’ve had on students and businesses.
A: Walmart Global Tech India has launched two engagements to recruit female coders.Through hackathons focused on diversity (hiring the challenge), Walmart engaged with more than 90,000 girls across the nation and eventually hired 300or more.
In the same way, Amazon engaged with 22,000+ MBA students in one engagement and Flipkart was engaged with 1.6 lakh engineering students.
And Unstop provides students and young professionals in all areas, regardless of their backgrounds to study how to practice, develop, and participate in gaming-based activities like hackathons, quizzes or simulations, case competitions, etc.organized by companies to show off their talents, be recognized and earn points on their resumes, and eventually , be hired.
More than 3.5 million professionals and students make use of our platform.
Q What are some of the newest technologies that could further transform education over the next 4 years?
A: From an industry viewpoint, anything that gets students in a job-ready state will be a boost.Companies like ours that offer opportunities to all and every one BeyondBoundaries will grow in a multitude of ways as companies are expanding with jobs being filled by the top talent, regardless of their school, city or academic background.
Only their abilities are important, and that’s what the system should work.
Q What do cloud technology and AWS let you accomplish that you weren’t able to do before?
A: AWS has allowed us to scale quickly in an extremely secure environment to safeguard our data.As an SaaS business, spikes could occur in at any moment in time from any location across the globe.AWS has made sure that we are prepared for any spike that may occur.
Making newer use cases an easy pace, AWS’s ever-changing ecosystem with new APIs and services allows us to come up with new use cases we can apply to our customers.For instance, we have one of the most advanced next-generation proctoring methods built on the Amazon Rekognition engine.We are currently working on an Amazon-like recommendation engine built on the Amazon Personalize engine.
We’ve offered a one-stop solution to our clients as a result of AWS’s one-stop service available to us via AWS.We’ve conducted 1.6 lakh tests on one of our clients in 24 hours with no hassle because of servers that are serverless and the instant scaling.
We’ve increased our capacity by 20x after signing up for serverless database immediately.We’ve cut down our latency by a quarter and increased our availability across the world by using an availability cloud that spans multiple regions.We’ve developed new features and use cases for our customers in only one-third of the time due to the use of AWS APIs, such as Amazon Rekognition.
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